Diverse Issues in Higher Education
April 29, 2013
HBCU
Deans of Education Rethinking How to Make Teaching a Major Attraction
by Lydia Lum
by Lydia Lum
One of Dr. Lillian Poats’ pet initiatives as
dean of Texas Southern University’s College of Education is a book club in
which students, faculty and staff read an agreed-upon book about urban
education or minority school children and informally meet to discuss it.
“What’s great is that the book club has
gotten us talking to each other instead of each of us going into our offices
and closing our doors,” Poats said. “This has started a dialogue around our
students and helps them better understand what it means to become a teacher
working with minorities.”
Another successful TSU strategy in recent
years, Poats said, has been group training in mobile technology for faculty who
were not yet using smartphones and tablet computers. “Some faculty have
grandchildren who could work phones and iPads, so we needed to get the faculty
up to speed,” she said.
Poats’ remarks came during a workshop at the
annual American Educational Research Association conference. The TSU dean spoke
at a workshop titled, “A Dialogue with Deans of Education at HBCUs.” During
that session, she and Dr. Marshá Horton, education dean at Virginia Union
University, shared some of their best practices.
Horton said she frequently steers students
to the university’s career services office to apply for one of the myriad
internships ranging from McDonald’s to the White House. Because college
students in her state cannot major in education, they instead major in
interdisciplinary studies and focus on a specific content area.
As education dean for only a year, Horton
adopted this motto: “It’s All About SWAG.” The acronym stands for “Students
With Academic Greatness” and incentivizes young people to strive for good
grades by rewarding them with signed certificates from Horton if they earn a
3.2 grade point average. So far, at least 10 percent of her students have
qualified, she said.
Horton noted that her impetus for “SWAG”
came from a similar practice at Albany State University, “so I’m not ashamed to
borrow and share ideas.” Nodding at Poats, she voiced her willingness to launch
an informal book club at Virginia Union, too, as audience members at the
workshop laughed.
Devoted to the scientific study of
education, AERA boasts more than 25,000 members. With a conference theme of
“Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis,” the San Francisco
event drew about 14,000 scholars and national thought leaders. For five days,
they are examining a cornucopia of topics as diverse as rural education, queer
studies, Catholic education, indigenous peoples of the Americas and charter
school research and evaluation.
The HBCU education deans workshop was part
of a slate under “Research Focus on Black Education.”
Poats said she spends substantial amounts of
time painstakingly recruiting students to major in education “because they
perceive other majors, like business, will be more prestigious.”
She has also managed to provide some
financial support for faculty travel to professional conferences to present
papers. Such support is key to encouraging their scholarly growth, Poats says,
because their teaching load is frequently four or five classes at a time, “so
they’re already struggling for time to write a paper of their own.”
The Houston-based TSU has 58 faculty members
in its education school, including 6 tenured and tenure-track faculty members
whom Poats hired in the past year. She also hired a visiting professor to
specifically work with students in order to improve their performances on the
required licensing exams to become teachers.
Poats said she doesn’t believe the
shortcomings in her department vary much from those of her counterparts at
traditionally White universities, “except for money, because we certainly do
more with less.” As an example, doctoral fellows at TSU teach courses alongside
the full-time faculty, rather than merely conducting research.
Meanwhile, her book club initiative, which
isn’t mandatory to join, but nonetheless has drawn a wide following, has
supplemented classroom learning and clinical experiences as student teachers.
Book selections thus far have included Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings’ Dreamkeepers
and Dr. Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children.
In the 1980s, TSU officials determined that
its education school should focus on preparing teachers for urban communities,
Poats said, “so we make sure that when they go into the inner city, they’re not
in shock.”
Very few of Houston’s urban schools remain
majority-Black and have grown increasingly Mexican-American, South American and
Vietnamese, she said.
Because some TSU students grew up in suburbs
rather than in urban neighborhoods, “we need to work with them even more,”
Poats said.
Dr. Chance Lewis, the Belk distinguished
professor of urban education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte,
said he suggested convening the workshop featuring Poats and Horton because
HBCUs still produce more than 50 percent of teachers of color in this country.
Furthermore, of the 20 institutions around
the country that produce the most African-American teachers, nine are HBCUs,
such as Bethune-Cookman College, Mississippi Valley State University and
Fayetteville State University, Lewis said.
At least one panelist at another AERA
conference workshop agreed with Lewis and the education deans.
Dr. Kimberley Freeman, an associate
professor in educational psychology at Howard University, conducted a two-year
study at two public HBCUs in which she examined the education of science and
math teachers, especially how college culture and curriculum resulted in
program effectiveness. Freeman shared her findings at a workshop titled,
“Public Schools, Universities and Leadership Positions for STEM People of
Color.”
Based on classroom observation and
interviews of faculty and focus groups of students, Freeman found that the
nurturing, family-like atmosphere at HBCUs was one of the most commonly cited
pluses. Students gave high marks to teachers willing to use multiple pedagogies
rather than merely lecture. Students also valued the early-career field
experiences in schools so they could connect course work to practice, Freeman
said, adding, “HBCUs can lead the nation” in producing minority science
and math teachers.
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